You break a glass in the kitchen and when your partner asks who did it, you
blame your friend who was round the other day.
You get into a physical altercation with someone in the street and run away –
leaving your friends or family to deal with the danger on their own.
You are getting onto a train and instead of letting the elderly lady on in front
of you, you push ahead.
Your friends are peer pressuring you into smoking weed and accusing you of
not being fun. Smoking weed is something you have no interest in in this
hypothetical situation but you let yourself get talked into it for fear of
appearing lame.
You are happily married when an attractive woman/man makes their move on
you. You give in to your momentary impulse and you sleep with them,
effectively wrecking your relationship with not only your partner but your
children as well.
You are unhappy in your relationship or job but you stay in it because you
don’t have the heart to tell the person or you are too afraid of what the future
might bring.Some of these examples are more extreme than others. Of course, there is a big
difference between eating ice cream when you really shouldn’t and being swayed by
hate speech! And occasionally losing your cool is normal. But while these points
might all seem very different, they essentially come from the same thing: weakness.
Weakness is often the source of our problems and even of evil. Weakness means
giving in to things we know aren’t right, or making excuses and putting off our goals.
Now let’s look at how someone strong might approach the same issues:
You wake up in the morning and realize your favorite shirt is torn. You shrug
and wear something else, recognizing this is a very small issue in the grand
scheme of things!